


La Douleur Exquise

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of PTSD, Minor Allura/Lance (Voltron), Minor Character Death, post season five
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-13 10:04:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14746767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Shiro is determined to pick up the pieces of the life that he left behind. This begins, and ends, with Keith.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DracoSH](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DracoSH/gifts).



> **La Douleur Exquise** : a French idiom directly translated to “The Exquisite Pain”. This phrase is commonly used to describe the unspeakable pain caused by being hurt by the one who you love.

The lights, the smoke, the resonant, ear-splitting noise. The bullets sprayed around him, nicking his prosthetic arm, his chinked armor. They’re tearing through the air, too hot and too close—too dangerous, too familiar, so commonplace after so many years of fighting this same war that Shiro can’t bring himself to even worry about any of it anymore.

There’s confusion all around him, as the sentries grapple for some sort of upper hand. As the organic, flesh-and-blood soldiers scramble wildly for cover, shooting from behind the corners of the room, through the open crater that he’d torn through the ship when he’d barreled in here.

The Black Lion purrs just some ways away. It’s pleased, for the first time in months since Shiro returned here—by this bloodshed, he supposes. By himself, finally slipping more comfortably into this position of power. By the mere idea that someone is finally doing something, and not just allowing this terrible situation to fester worse and worse with each passing, stagnant day.

The Galra around him are  screaming now—the room is booming with sound. He can hear their voices just barely above the crack of their guns, the deafening reverberation of explosions. They’re yelling desperately in their coms,  _ “There’s only one soldier! He’s tearing this whole place apart! Where is his backup?! Why is there only just one?!” _

_ We thought that Voltron didn’t know about this place. _

_ We thought that the Black Paladin was on our side. _

If Shiro weren’t so acutely focused on the task at hand, he might laugh. If he weren’t so distracted by the goal that he’s set his sights upon, he might lament about these pathetic, cartoonish villains that he’d spent so much time fearing. He might wonder how he’s come to this point in time, where he barely bats an eye as Galra soldiers surround him, mimicking perfectly a blurry portrait of a long-forgotten past that doesn’t even feel quite real anymore.

There are some things, he thinks, that are more important than his trauma. There are some things far more pertinent right now than cowering in fear.

He’s been a lion trapped behind the bars of a circus cage for far too long. The door is open now, no one is holding him back. And with these first few tentative steps towards freedom—towards finally reclaiming the life that they stole from him, he feels nothing right now if not invigorated and so profoundly  _ alive _ .

He can feel another panic attack rising like static in his chest. He can imagine himself, months ago, years ago, folding under the weight of these soldiers’ forceful hands.

But now, he feels nothing. He activates his prosthetic arm. He mows through these men as though they were nothing but flimsy cardboard. And he can feel his heart hammering in his ears, pushing hot blood like iron through his veins.

He’s a tank now. He’s a monster.

He’s a champion.

He’s here to make things right now. To fix this.

To finally make a move when everyone else seemed too scared to pursue this.

To rescue the only person who’s ever loved him wholly, no matter how inhuman he might have become.

Shiro is on the warpath. He’s ambling through the identical halls of a Galra warship, among the last straggling rebels of the previous throne. He’s tearing down sentries, ignoring the sting of their lasers piercing the small bits of his exposed skin.

He can feel blood wet and bubbling up from every single tiny cut. He can feel himself, out of breath, on the threshold of something dark and terrifying deep within himself that he’s too focused now to call exactly what it is: a thirst for revenge.

It’s been almost a year since he disappeared from the team. Eleven months, he’d counted down in revulsion on the calendar, when the Black lion had dragged him from the murky void where his spirit slept, safe. And it’s been six months, too, since Keith vanished as well. Since the team began to feel suspicious that their leader wasn’t who they thought that he was—since he’d allowed the former black paladin to denounce his title, to wander off with the Blade of Marmora.

Since the team had heard no word from Keith at all, and “Shiro”, then, had acted as though a Keith had never existed at all.

Shiro understands that his team did the best that they could. He doesn’t blame them, isn’t angry with them, because they let Keith down.

He knows that he, too, must have let Keith down in some shape or form. He understands that his soul was weak enough, that it couldn’t stop itself from nearly being destroyed in Zarkon’s hands. The Black Lion had saved him then, sent him somewhere to lick his wounds, to mend himself in silence.

And Keith had led the team. Keith had shifted the weight of that burden onto his tiny, unprepared shoulders.

He’d carried everything that Shiro had left for him totally alone, unquestioning. Silent and brooding in his desperate loyalty, searching for any sign of Shiro, at any chance that he could find.

Shiro knows that he owes a lot to Keith. He knows that the team, too, can never understand how many of these missions would have been lost without him. He knows that Keith would have done anything to save him—would have allowed himself to lead the group, despite how undeserving or ill-prepared he might have considered himself to be.

He would have searched forever, would have fought anyone who got in his way.

And he would have allowed himself to be dragged off by Haggar and her minions, wordlessly, without calling for backup, without begging for help, without calling out for Shiro when he truly must have needed him the most.

Keith had allowed himself to be ensnared here, and no matter how helplessly the Blade of Marmora had worried that he might have folded under the interrogation—the _ torture _ , Shiro tells himself. It deserves the respect of being called exactly what it must have been.

But no matter how many people suspected that he’d eventually leak sensitive information about the rebellion, no matter how reasonable it might have been to presume that any normal person couldn’t handle so much pain over such a long course of time without folding, the months had passed, the days had turned into weeks and into nearly half a year, and it seemed as though Keith Kogane had truly disappeared without a trace.

No sign of leaked intel. No sign of a breakout attempt. No sign or any indication as to where he went, sans a suspicious conversation that Pidge had picked up between Shiro’s other self and an unknown set of confusing coordinates, that she’d only caught the staticky tailend of murmuring through the speakers of her laptop.

Pidge had consulted Lance then, who had noticed, with Allura’s help, that the Red and Black lions’ energy levels were going berserk. Allura had described the whole thing as some sort of ripple of electricity through the castle, a shuddering moment in which the supernatural life force of the around ship them seemed to falter, cave, under the anger and determination of those two lions.

She’d said that she’d never felt anything like it—like the two of them were planning to take off. Like they were upset, infuriated, and organizing some sort of coup between the two of them.

_ “I haven’t seen the Red lion react so autonomously since… well…”  _ She’d allowed the ending of that sentence to trail off, die away quietly as Shiro has watched her speak. Her eyes had been glassy as she’d pulled her gaze away.

_ Since Keith _ . He’d known it, even if she refused to finish that thought.

He could almost hear the sound of Keith’s name on the tip of her hesitant tongue, could almost imagine how it must have been to hear her talk about him, before he’d went away. He knows now that the team had given him a hard time when he’d become the leader. He knows that Keith didn’t blame them for any of it. But he also knows that they chose his other self over Keith, that they’d gravitated towards the familiar presence of trusted leader—disregarded Keith’s wholly better advice in favor of instilling their loyalty in someone who they were more familiar following.

He doesn’t think that they were wrong to do so, even though he knows that they were wrong. He knows that it was cruel, in an innocent, well-meaning way. He knows that Keith must have taken it only as his cue to step down, and not as the first hints of something terribly wrong taking over the team that he’d been forced to lead.

They weren’t qualified to handle everything that blossomed in his absence. They had no way of comprehending what terrible darkness lurked just around the corner in their futures.

He knows that they feel terrible now. He knows that they might always regret it.

And he hopes that after today, Keith can tell them himself—that they did what they could. They did what they thought was best for themselves, the universe, this team.

Keith won’t blame them, won’t even consider it.

Keith, he knows, is nothing if not immediately forgiving.

His teammates speak of Keith as though he’s a ghost. They refer to him in past tense, if they ever speak of him at all. They’ve mourned him, since he went away. They looked for any sign of him under the other Shiro’s nose—when they could find a good reason to sneak away. When they’d felt as though he wouldn’t question it, wouldn’t be thrown into another rage at the mere concept of any of them sparing another thought on a “deserter” like Keith.

And maybe it had seemed to them as though Keith had ruined another opportunity for himself, and them. Given his track record—with the Garrison, with the team, with so many other things that might have looked like pretty damning evidence to the untrained eye—it must not have been hard for the other Shiro to convince them that Keith had just run away again.

The Blade hadn’t heard from him since he’d headed off on a routine intel-gathering mission to a dead planet, just at the furthest reaches of the galaxy. He was just supposed to be testing the toxicity of the air, the radioactivity in the soil. He’d been helping the Blade search for new homes for refugees without planets to return to. They’d been trying, since the turning point of Lotor taking the throne, to rebuild when everything had seemed to be getting better.

Keith had radioed in to tell them of a mysterious aircraft overhead, something unexplained blipping with an oddly intense level of energy. He’d told them that he wasn’t worried—it was a small ship. It was mundane and unassuming. It hadn’t seemed to be more than someone passing through. He’d told them that he’d sent a transmission to the ship, giving the pilot a vague amount of information and secret code words that would mean nothing but gibberish to anyone still allied with the Galra. It was again, routine. Kolivan had told Shiro later that he’d thought nothing of it. It wasn’t abnormal to find more refugees floating aimlessly through barren galaxies—without homes, searching for somewhere to plant their roots. And it was part of the Blade’s regular duties to report to them that the war has ended, and it’s time to find them a new home.

But then there was static, only moments after Keith’s last transmission, Kolivan had told him. A few clipped scratches that might have sounded like a struggle. When Kolivan had sent out rescue crew to survey the situation, there had been nothing but that demolished radio and Keith’s knife left behind in a flurry of dust and demolished soil.

It had looked, Kolivan had told him, as though someone had been intent on destroying the entire planet. It had seemed as though, more realistically, Keith had dodged whatever attack they’d sent down to him, and struggled to reach his ship again to counter-attack.

But the ship had also been destroyed. There had been no bones and no corpse crystallized in the dead air, in the many scattered pieces of shrapnel floating aimlessly in the atmosphere.

Kolivan hadn’t seemed particularly concerned about it. At least, that’s what he’d pretended to feel when Shiro had pressed the issue. Shiro suspects that he might have been hiding any fear or betrayal that he’d felt—commenting on the recent return of Keith’s mother seemingly offhandedly. Telling Shiro that it hadn’t seemed within Keith’s character to abandon something so crucial, without warning them first or even affording them a reason why.

Shiro had known that Kolivan was worried too. He’d known that Kolivan had contacted Voltron at the first sign of trouble. He might have felt some semblance of fatherly responsibility for Keith. He might have felt as though Voltron would never forgive him if he allowed a former paladin to disappear.

But “Shiro”, Kolivan had told him, had reacted with nonchalance. He’d said, with a firm jaw and hard eyes, with no offer of discernible emotions but a blithe wave of his hand in the air, _ “Keith isn’t the most reliable soldier in the world. His unwillingness to commit to what’s right is what made him a poor leader.” _

And the issue had seemed to be dropped. There was nothing further to be said about it, no leads to go on, no path to trace in any conceivable direction, as the only proof that the Blade had of a struggle was still obliterated in the orbit of that abandoned planet.

And an intergalactic war, a Shiro whose mental state seemed to be deteriorating further and more dangerously each day, and so many other stressors plaguing their team, distracted them just long enough that they’d found that nearly eleven months had passed by the time that the Black and Red lions managed to drag the real Shiro from the hazy in-between where he’d been hiding in the astral plane.

The confusion of two Shiro’s had been outshined by the one who they’d thought had been their leader seeming to be thrown into a violent panic at the sight of his doppleganger. He’d lashed out, grown erratic, unpredictable. They hadn’t understand what had been going on—and Shiro still doesn’t, not entirely. He doesn’t know what must have happened to his team while he was away. He didn’t know what to make of the raving lunatic of an identical version of himself suddenly lighting up his galra arm and charging at him.

But when he’d pinned the man to the ground, when he’d forced his jellied, untrained muscles to move on their own and assist him in warding off this false version of himself, the man had seemed to snap into a brief state of vivid clarity.

He’d told Shiro, in too few words, where Keith had gone. He’d told Shiro, _ “I was supposed to expire a long time ago.” _

He’d told Shiro,  _ “You have to kill me—p-please, I can’t keep doing this to the team.” _

_ “Please, tell Keith that I’m sorry.” _

And Shiro had killed himself, in the least metaphorical sense of the word. He’d crushed his own windpipe in his hand, watched the light fade from his own eyes. And he’d felt, in that moment, powerful.

He’d felt as though he could do anything if he could do something like that.

Maybe, even, take on an entire Galra army just to finally rescue Keith.

A large fraction of the team—everyone but Lance and himself—had collected the other Shiro’s remains after that. They’d run every test on him that they could think of, and they’d enlisted the help of a few hyper-intelligent alien allies to help them crack the all of the riddles and ominous mysteries surrounding the man who seemed to be their leader, who seemed to think that he was their leader, but left everything in such disarray.

Lance had placed a comforting hand on his shoulder when Pidge had wandered out to talk to them.

“Biologically,” she’d told them, “he’s exactly like you. Down to the most microscopic strands of DNA. But…”

She’d flicked her gaze away. Her eyes, like Allura’s months later, like everyone’s would be every time that they recounted the guilt that they felt at accepting that stranger into their midst without question, had been glassy and unfocused. Her brows had been pulled tight, her hands shaking. Shiro had felt too deflated to step forward and comfort her. Lance’s hand had felt like a tether then—like warm, soft steel, tying him down to that reality, that crucial moment in time.

“He used to complain about—about headaches a lot. I guess—I guess it was because his brain was deteriorating every day, like—like he was made to last just long enough to mess everything up, and—”

She didn’t think that his other self was doing it on purpose. Shiro had felt guilt then, when Lance had confirmed that the other him had voiced concerns over his own behavior.

Shiro had felt torn between two very reasonable reactions: blaming the other version of himself for messing everything up, and ignoring the fact that he’d clearly had no control over his actions, that they’d upset him, often.

Or to be more realistic—to accept the idea that his other self had been just another victim of this horrible war. That he, too, was a fallen soldier who’d fought the best fight that he was capable.

That he, too, should be remembered with only the dignity and regret that he so deserved.

Nothing is easy in war, he knows that. There are never any decisions that could be considered unarguably black and white. And he knows that he’ll never feel completely contented with this idea of another version of himself—of what he was apparently capable of, under the right conditions.

What he could do to his team—to Keith.

What could have happened to him, if only the Galra had these specific ideas in mind when they’d first captured him on Kerberos.

He’s tearing through every room along the halls now, barely waiting for his Galra arm to activate the locks on the doors before he’s tearing them off of the tracks to pry them open. Five rooms down, and there’s no Keith. There are scientists terrified and raising their arms in surrender. There are sentries who open fire the moment he steps through the threshold from the hall. There are bodies splayed about in his path like rag dolls—blank eyed and motionless. Forgotten, in his haste, only moments after he mows them down.

He’s a one man army. He’s nothing more than a machine.

He is everything that they’ve made him to be, because of them, because of all of this.

Because of Keith.

He can hear the warning sirens blaring over head as an escape pod is launched out into space. His heart ricochets around in his chest, bumping against his rib cage and his lungs, as he considers how likely it might be that Haggar and her more prominent minions would bring one single, distinguished prisoner along with them on their attempted escape from this sudden attack.

But he’s still tearing through the place, leaving no spot untouched, to room unturned, no hall void of a body count. He pauses only to finally call for backup—Lance and the rest of the team waiting off in the distance in their lions, waiting for him to report in with any news, any sign of Keith, or any indication that he might have went into this ill-prepared.

He tells them of the rescue pod. Lance affirms that he and Allura have a visual and they’re moving in on it now. He asks who’s trying to escape. He says Shiro’s name three times in what feels like quick succession, as Shiro tears his attention away from the conversation as he spots another line of rooms in a distant hall.

He doesn’t hear anything else that’s being spoken on the coms. He can’t focus on anything but the steel bending in his grip, the blood rushing in his ears, his heart booming in his chest.

He charges through the new set of soldiers. Their bones crunch, their blood bubbles in his unstoppable hands. Each door pried open yields nothing but more dead bodies. It seems now that this ship has no prisoners. It seems as though it serves only the sole purpose of keeping one very important soldier captive, hidden from the rest of his team.

He checks off each room, searches meticulously. He tosses hospital beds, shoves aside the doors of cages—rustles through the bedding in a single cell, feeling bile rise in his throat as more memories hammer around in the inside of his brain, threatening to drag him away from this focused mission—threatening to pull him back into a hazy past, that he knows that he doesn’t have time for right now.

He’ll lick his wounds later. He’ll compartmentalize these emotions, tuck them away neatly and quietly deep inside of himself, when he finds that he has more time.

There’s one final room, at the furthest edge of the ship. There are more sentries guarding this one—more bodies in his path. More metal crushed easily in his prosthetic fist.

It feels like an eternity as he waits for the door to skitter open. The entire ship is glitching out now, the blaring sirens so loud, the red flashing lights so blinding that if he weren’t so hopped up on so much adrenaline, he might not be able to focus on anything but covering his ears and eyes to shield them from this obnoxious, unending assault to his senses.

But the door, eventually, does yield to him. It takes a few punches and a few angry kicks. It takes more than his hand on the keypad, he notices a few moments too late. It’s asking for a password along with the Galra identification. He doesn’t have time for this.

He finds that pretty much any security can be cracked with the right amount of violence. He reassures himself that the rest of the team won’t ever have to witness him like this—so angry and desperate and so ferociously slamming his boot into this locked door, until the hinges creak, the steel bends, and the technology within it becomes so damaged that it skitters open pathetically.

The room inside is shadowed. The lights around him are sparking as he steps further into the inside. It’s similar to every other corner of this ship that he’s ransacked so far. It’s disheveled, obviously having been abandoned in a hurry. There are shelves lined with half-filled vials—with tools glinting in the small amount of light that pours in from the hall. It’s purple, from the walls to the floor, the shelves to even the single medical table stationed at the center of the room, shoved far back against the wall.

He can feel his belly roiling, can feel the skitters of anxiety jumping in his muscles. He’s brought back, for a brief moment, to a version of himself that was once strapped to one of these tables. He imagines how he must have looked tied down there, bleary in half-consciousness, begging for some kind of relief, forgiveness, pity in the cold, unloving, most dangerous corners of space.

He imagines how he must have felt when they’d taken his arm—how the drills must have felt pounding into bone, shattering it away. How he must have pleaded with them to release him. How pitiful he must have sounded then—how petrified and terribly, terribly weak.

With a shake of his head, and a staggered, shallow breath, he forces himself to focus instead on the here and now.

It reeks of blood. It stinks of medicine, of hot electricity, of burning flesh. It smells like something has been festering in here, uninhibited by cleaning supplies, by magic. It smells as though the stain of sadness and pain can never truly be washed away.

He’s reminded of another hazy memory—of a too small cell jam-packed like a tuna can among thousands of others. He reminded of raising his weapon in the area, among the excited howls of hundreds of excited fans.

He can’t even focus hard enough on any of this sensory information to cover his nose against the putrid smell.

He can’t pull himself out of his memories long enough to convince himself that he isn’t still trapped here.

He can feel it here—an energy concentrated, humming through the walls, popping in the stale, rotten air. It feels as though something terrible has happened in this room. Light spills in from the hall—red-cast and flickering. Dim enough that he can only see the furthest edge of the medical table, pushed flush against the furthest wall.

The glow of his prosthetic is the only light source that he can use to illuminate the space in front of him.

He can hear the humming of a drill skittering against the tile somewhere in the corner of the room. There are vials broken and shattered on the floor. The glass crunches under his boots as he steps forward. Things have been knocked about as though whoever inhabited this space left in a hurry. And he knows, as his instincts are kicking into overdrive, as his adrenaline pumps ever-harder in his veins, that this must have been where Haggar and her men were experimenting on _ someone _ . On whoever must have been so important that they’d dedicate this entire ship, this entire fleet of dead men, just to conceal them.

_ Someone _ —he realizes, as he’s jarred out of his rampant thoughts by a soft, feeble moan from the shadowed hospital bed—who he might have been looking for all this time.

He rushes immediately to the bedside. He feels as though he exists now, alone in this bubble with just the person before him inside, and the whole world—the whole angry blaring universe, with its flashing lights and bellowing sirens, with the voice of Lance chattering over his com that they’ve destroyed Haggar’s ship, with the surviving soldiers screaming somewhere far off in the distance—muffled and unclear just beyond the murky surface of it.

He leans forward, careful with his Galra arm not to bring the heat of it too close to this prisoner’s face. The soft light of it reveals the straps tied tight around their wrists—angry and red and married with the old yellowing bruises, just under the sharp edges of the cuffs. It illuminates the blood dark against the surface of the table, the shallow cuts, weeping and drying out, clotting slowly but wholly not taken care of. He can taste the copper of it in the air. There’s so much blood here. It jams ice through his veins—mingling with the heat that he’d felt just moments ago. It sends his belly into knots, a dizziness through his head that’s so intense that he feels as though he might fall over if he doesn't grab on to something to support himself.

It sends more memories flashing through his mind—like a roll of film, like a whisper of something forbidden and dark deep inside of himself that he couldn’t mend even if he could reach that deep inside and wrap his fingers around it.

It reminds him, once again, of the days when he’d find himself on tables like these—of the fights in the gladiator ring. Of the experiments in too bright rooms, under not-gentle hands, in the midst of monsters that he still didn’t understand—speaking of him as though he couldn’t hear them, laughing at him when he’d struggled to escape. Of the needles, the drills, the blood caked at the edges of his wounds.

He nearly topples over as a feeling of vertigo rushes through him—and as he falters, as he sways helplessly and reaches out his flesh arm to grasp the edge of the bed to support him. His lighted arm finally comes close enough to the body of this captive to make out their expression.

He’d known, deep down, that it would be Keith.

He’d come all the way out here just to find him.

But imagining this scenario—romanticizing this rescue venture and how wonderful it might feel to finally see and hear and  _ touch _ Keith again—and actually _ seeing _ Keith pinned down to this table have proven to be two very different things.

In his imagination, there wouldn’t be quite so much blood.

In even his most terrible nightmares, Keith would have never looked so broken.

Keith’s eyelashes are heavy and wet. They’re twitching against his gaunt, hollow cheeks. He barely looks like himself anymore. He’s so thin and smattered with color. He’s arched awkwardly, bent at odd, seemingly unnatural angles. He’s black and purple, scarlet and yellow. He’s a skeleton here—draped in too much unhealthy color. The rising and falling of his chest is so subtle that, if Shiro weren’t watching him so closely now, he might have thought that Keith was dead.

He’s dressed in the same tunic that Shiro remembers from his days as a slave to these people, but it’s longer—long enough that it drapes over his bony knees. His legs are spread to the opposite corners of the table—bound down with more straps. His bones are so prominent now that Shiro can see every line of them poking up through the fabric.

The front of the tunic has been torn open. In the scrapped edges of it, there’s a growing stain of dark, fresh blood.

Again, Shiro feels so overwhelmed now that he might pass out. His stomach lurches, bile rising in his throat.

But he holds on, grapples to find even an ounce of the determination that had gotten him here. He needs to see this through for Keith. He needs to be strong enough to get him back to the Black Lion—floating just outside of the hole that he left in the side of the ship, and waiting for him to return to take it back to the castle.

He needs to get Keith out of these straps, bring him back to safety, and stick him in the cryopod as soon as he possibly can.

From the look of Keith, he doesn’t have much longer left.

And frankly, in such a poor state, Shiro is surprised that he’s even made it this long at all.

He’s careful in the way that he fiddles with the clasps around Keith’s wrists. He finds a shard of broken glass on the floor, picks it up in his flesh hand before setting it on an empty spot on bed next to Keith. And he apologizes softly, ignoring the smell of burning fabric as he reaches down and tears a small stretch of material from the bottom of Keith’s tunic.

It still feels inappropriate to see Keith so underdressed. He hasn’t ever seen him this naked before.

And something about this vulnerable, intimate position does nothing to quell his feelings, that he’s peeking in on something that he isn’t allowed to see. He feels as though this is forbidden somehow—seeing Keith, so strong, so driven, so unshakable, so downtrodden and such a husk of who he was before.

He feels as though, if Keith miraculously manages to survive this, he might never forgive him for witnessing him in such a phenomenally delicate state.

He brushes those thoughts off, shaking his head. He needs to focus now. It doesn’t matter if Keith never forgives him. It doesn’t matter if Keith never wants to see him again, when all of this is said and done.

All that matters is that he manages to get Keith back to safety—to save him, as Keith has always been so good at saving him.

He uses the fabric from Keith’s tunic to wrap around the sharp bottom edge of the glass, fastening himself a handle, holding his new weapon in his flesh hand, and begins to wear away at the leather binding Keith’s wrists.

Within a few minutes, one hand is free. It feels as though precious minutes are ticking by as he struggles with this task, but the last thing he wants is to melt through the fabric of them and burn Keith. The last thing he needs right now is to hurt Keith even more than the Galra have already hurt him.

When Keith is freed, Shiro hesitates. He swallows thickly, taking in the sight of Keith’s emaciated form. He looks so fragile now, so dried out and withered. Shiro can’t imagine this version of Keith fighting the Galra. He can’t imagine him taking on the task of the Blade of Marmora initiation. He can’t imagine this tiny, skinny Keith in any of his memories, but he knows that it’s the same Keith who saved him back at the Garrison. The same Keith who’s rescued him time and time again. From the open tear in the front of his tunic, in the darkness only quelled by the soft pink hue of Shiro’s Galra arm glowing in the thick blanket of shadows, he can barely make out the outline of a deep, darkened scar that he remembers very vividly.

_ “He’ll never stop.” _

He remembers telling that to Kolivan, while watching Keith being beaten bloody, over and over again, in that arena. He remembers knowing, with absolution, that Keith would keep fighting until the bitter end. And he was just as right back then as he is now.

Keith will keep fighting, no matter what that means. Keith will keep trudging on, no matter how helpless or bleak the future before him seems to be.

Shiro knows that Keith must not have understood why he kept going, through all of this. He knows it because he lived it too—this hopeless situation. The torture of each day crashing against him endlessly, disorienting, painful, too loud and too bright and so overwhelming that he might be surprised now to know how much time has passed.

Shiro steps closer forward, deactivating his arm and waiting for the heat of it to cool. When it’s cold enough to the touch that he knows he won’t burn Keith, he slips one arm under those bony knees, the other beneath his sharp shoulder blades. And he scoops him up, the wind knocking out of his lungs as he realizes how much lighter Keith is now. His heart is squeezed, tight and painful, in his rib cage as he steadies his footing, adjusts Keith firmer against his chest, and turns to peer out of the darkened room into the hall.

Keith groans again, softly. His voice sounds rough in his throat—his mouth dry, the sound of it rattling hollow through the air.

Shiro presses him closer to his chest. The feeling of Keith, warm against him, despite how small and broken and different he seems to be—it ignites a feeling within him that startles him. He feels, once again, all of the dwindling fire within him rekindled to a brighter, bigger flame.

“We’re gonna get you out of here, buddy,” he tells Keith, careful as he steps over the broken glass and discarded tools on the floor, “You’re safe now. Everything is going to be okay.”

_ I’m going to make this right, somehow. _

_ I promise, I’m going to make this up to you, no matter what it takes. _

 

* * *

 

Keith feels as though he exists on the threshold of this living, vibrant world, and a quieter, darker, blurry and bewildering world of memories and colors—sights and sounds and sensations that throb painfully on the inside of his skull.

He’s vaguely aware of the fact that he’s being carried now. He wonders for how long they experimented on him today. He wonders what they must have found within him—what they might have put there.

And he tells himself, sleepily, that if Shiro lived through this for a year, so can he. He’s not fighting in the gladiator arena. He’s not unprepared, confused, or scared. This isn’t as bad as anything that Shiro went though. He can do this. He can wait. He can survive in this world that Shiro once existed in, and he won’t give up until they finally grow tired of playing with him and throw him away.

He owes that to Shiro, at the very least, since in every other conceivable way, he’s let him down. He’s betrayed any small inkling of faith that Shiro must have once had in him. He’s disappointed him, again and again. He’d always known that Shiro expected more from him than he was capable of giving back. He’d always known that Shiro was too bright of a star to exist in his universe for far too long, before the light of it finally faded away.

He’d always known that whatever was going on between them would end in disaster, in pain, in betrayal—in himself, always letting everyone down. In Keith Kogane, never quite as smart, or capable, or talented as everyone might have assumed when they got the slightest inkling of his talent or undeserved cockiness.

And if he feels as though the chest against him is warm and firm, if the creases of it feel too familiar to the man who he’d give anything to see right now—

He knows that it’s all a figment of his imagination. He knows that Shiro is never coming here. He’d made it clear, during the single transmission that Haggar and her drones had sent the team, that they were completely unwilling to bargain for him.

Keith knows that he shouldn’t be disappointed, or hurt. He knows that it would have been irresponsible for the Paladins to risk everything just to save him.

And he knows that Shiro is a good leader. Shiro can made hard decisions when he would be too foolish, too focused on his own selfish feelings, and fail.

He pretends that the look in Shiro’s eyes hadn’t broken his heart. That stare, through the fuzzy screen between them, looking at him as though he was nothing but the most unsightly stain on the universe.

_ “That soldier is more trouble than he’s worth,”  _ Shiro had told them, _ “He’s your problem now.” _

Keith was positive that it had to be a bluff. He was certain that Shiro would never speak about anyone that way, even himself. It hadn’t stopped him from feeling like a failure. It hadn’t stopped those words from becoming the proverbial salt that Haggar would rub in his wounds for months after.

They knew that they could get a rise out of him if they spoke about it. They knew that the easiest way to weaken him, to shatter his resolve, was to mention how even his beloved leader didn’t care that he was being detained here.

But now, as his eyes slide open, as he takes in the unfocused, jittery world around him, he isn’t sure where in the ship they’re taking him. He doesn’t know if it’s his own head conjuring up the images of disarray, or if perhaps they’ve just survived some kind of attack. He isn’t sure if the Blade would go through the trouble of rescuing him after Shiro made it clear that there wasn’t a reason to. But he does know that there’s important intel here—and a witch that they’ve been trying to track down for months.

His head is jostling slightly as the soldier carrying him continues on. It takes all of his strength to support it, not to just allow it to lull back and hang there. Curiously, when the person carrying him notices this, they make an effort to support him better. They cradle him as Keith imagines that a mother might cradle her small child. They’re carrying him now with such great care that he isn’t sure if this soldier is leading him to his death, and if maybe there’s just enough humanity left within them to make him comfortable before they finally put him out of his misery.

He opens his eyes a little bit wider. They’re so swollen and dry that he has trouble seeing anything clearly in the quick-blinking of light to dark.

He’s greeted with the outline of a strong jaw, thick eyebrows—the hints of a dark scar over the bridge of his nose—as they pass through an area flashing with warning lights. If he were strong enough to move, he might shake his head to clear his thoughts. He might reach up and wipe this illusion and the dry, crust of tears away from his swollen eyes.

But no matter how long he stares—no matter how many times he manages to force himself to blink—the soldier continues to look exactly like Shiro, how he had looked the night before they fought Zarkon for the very first time, before he’d disappeared, before Keith had messed everything up, before things had taken such a  terrible, violent turn between them that it seems, anymore, that Shiro would prefer to have nothing to do with him.

He knows that this can’t be real. He knows that Shiro wouldn’t have returned here for him.

And he looks too different now—looks just as he had that night when Keith had ruined everything.

His hair is shaved in exactly the same way. His face is unmarked by the stress and anger that he remembers warping his handsome features further and further as the months had rolled by after he’d returned.

Keith feels his pulse quickening. He feels the adrenaline pushing hard through his veins. He understands that he might die now. He can feel the blood wet and cold now in his wounds. They didn’t even bother to heal him this time. They didn’t see the point in mending him, and instead, must just be waiting for him to drain out on his own.

Not worth the resources or the trouble, he presumes. Even as a captive, he’d proved to be utterly, infuriatingly useless.

He makes to speak, but he can taste the blood thick in his throat. He coughs, painfully, feels the heat of it sputtering down his chin. The soldier— _ Shiro _ , handsome, barely smiling, looking strained and distraught—staring at him now with those cold eyes, telling Haggar that he’s better off dead—reeling back as though he’d been burned when Keith had tried to kiss him—vanished from that pilot’s seat in the Black Lion—dying of dehydration on that ship—unmoving and emotionless as he’d reached forward to end a transmission, as he cut off a trade midway through, just to tell Haggar that there was nothing worth coming to their base and exchanging for Keith’s life—he’s looking at Keith now. His lips are a flat line, then a smile, then an angry frown, a bashful, red cheeked, nervous expression, the relief of being rescued, that empty seat, the empty lion, the lax void of any emotion, so dead and broken strapped down to that table at the Garrison—Keith’s thoughts are so wild with different images that he feels dizzied by them, suddenly so exhausted that he wants nothing more than to sleep, or to die, or to just stop thinking and feeling long enough to rest.

This Shiro—this  _ Galra soldier _ —is pausing now, adjusting him awkwardly in his arms to wipe some of the blood from his face. Keith tries to flinch away, but there’s nowhere else to go. It feels so warm here. He feels so frightfully safe. He just wants to sleep. He wants to stop seeing Shiro in everyone. He wants to stop imagining that anyone would care enough to come out here, that anyone would ever be foolish enough to save him when he’s always making these critical mistakes.

Suddenly, just as his eyes are dropping down, he feels something warm and soft pressed against his wet lips. It feels familiar—in a peculiar way that he’s only felt once before this. It’s a long, drawn out sensation—something muted behind a thick layer of pain, beyond his exhaustion, beyond all of the rampant thoughts soaring through his head.

“It’s me.” It’s Shiro’s voice, too. Shiro’s warm breath fanning over his cheeks. “Keith, it’s me. You’re safe.”

Keith imagines that this might have been the kiss of death. He barely registers that they’re still moving, until he’s surrounded by lights so terribly bright that he’s forced to close his eyes against them.

“Sh-Shiro—” His voice is choppy, like razor blades tearing through his throat, “Shiro… I—I… I’m sorry.”

He isn’t sure for which specific thing he’s apologizing—but it should be everything. It should be for _ all of this _ . For letting him down, time and time again. For continuing to fail no matter what he tries to do. For getting himself captured, for putting Shiro in this position, where he’s been forced to decide not to save him. Where he’s felt, surely, too guilty to continue making the right decision, and risked losing this war just to rescue the same guy who wasn’t good enough not to get himself caught.

For kissing him, the night before that big fight—for surely ruining his focus and allowing him to be vulnerable to Zarkon’s attack. For causing all of this, and continuing, even now, to imagine that Shiro has just kissed him again, moments before his much-deserved death.

He can feel himself being shuffled into another position. He can feel Shiro’s legs underneath him, as though he’s now sitting in his lap. He can feel Shiro’s face in his hair, can feel another soft press of his lips against his scalp.

He hates that he’s this selfish. He hates that, no matter what, he’ll never be strong enough just to leave Shiro alone.

“It’s going to be okay, Keith,” Shiro tells him, as the purring around them grows so loud, so comforting and beckons him, finally, into sleep, “I got you. I’m here. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

Keith is selfish enough to wish that that were true.

He’s stupid enough to allow himself to believe, for one last, fleeting moment before sleep, that this is real, Shiro is here, and all of this is finally over.

He doesn’t think that he’ll wake up again.

He doesn’t think that he’ll even be alive in the morning to regret this.

And so, desperate and tired, eager to give in to this hallucination for even the smallest semblance of closure, he says another terrible thing.

He knows, deep down, that this isn’t the real Shiro. None of this is happening. He’s dying now, and he won’t be here tomorrow to pay any price for it.

“I love you.”

_ “Shiro”  _ stiffens around him.

He almost laughs.

This is exactly how it happened last time, too.

Even his subconscious won’t allow him to believe that Shiro could ever love him back.

 

* * *

 

Shiro nearly tears through the castle once the Black Lion lands back in the hangar. The other Paladins are waiting for him outside of their lions, wide-eyed and shocked into silence as he carries Keith through Black’s giant, open mouth.

Lance is the only one who speaks then, filling the silence and the pounding of Shiro’s own heartbeat in his ears with vibrant sound.

“I-is he alive?”

Shiro shakes his head, pushes past him, and in a frantic attempt to explain anything while his body is compelling him so desperately towards the healing pods, he barks out, “Not for long.”

Lance is quick then, to follow after him and help him through the corridors. He’s thankful, even if he can’t voice it in the moment, that he isn’t forced to fanagle his way through here without the use of his hands.

They’re nearly at the healing pods again when Keith seems to stir. He’s groaning again, and Shiro absently registers Lance’s quiet sigh of relief, his tiny, pitiful, “Oh, thank God.”

The rest of the Paladins are shuffling in behind them. They’re watching, in horror, as Shiro fumbles with righting Keith, and Lance belatedly steps forward to help him.

They have Keith’s feet on the floor, as Allura rushes out of the room to grab the cryopod suit, when Keith seems to come to, abruptly, loudly, desperately thrashing around the moment that he sees the pods.

Shiro recognizes the glassy, unfocused look in his eyes. He recognizes that blind fear—the look of a man who isn’t watching the world around him and registering the reality of it—the sight of someone peering back into their own past, seeing some terror that has rooted them firmly in their memories.

He’s yelling desperately. He’s kicking his feet, clocking Lance hard enough in the leg that Lance lets go of him and reels back. He’s punching weak fists into Shiro chest, yelling incoherently about something that Shiro imagines might be his complete and utter refusal to step foot into the pods.

“I—I’m not—not again—I—I won’t—j-just  _ kill me _ , please, I’m—I’m not doing that again—”

He doesn’t know what Keith might be seeing now. He doesn’t know what sort of monster he’s imagining these pods to be. But Keith won’t stop fighting them, and he’s struggling so hard that it’s opening the fresh wounds all over his body. Shiro stops trying to contain him, stops fighting him back. Gives in and accepts the fact that Keith won’t allow them to do this without a desperate struggle.

Shiro scoops him back up into his arms. Keith, already weakened from fighting, is already beginning to slip again into unconsciousness. When he wheels around, Allura is lingering just inches away, stock still, with the suit in her arms. They all stand around quietly, as Keith continues to scuffle weakly with him, scratching at his face, at his chest, at any part of him that he can dig those dulled nails into.

“W-we could bring him to the med bay instead,” Allura offers, her voice slow and careful, her eyes glossy as she watches Keith gradually beginning to wear himself out, “We still have those med kits from the Guuzapian Belt, so they should be able to stop any internal bleeding, and stop the spread of… infections… until, he’s…”

She trails off. She’s worrying the fabric in her hands, biting her lip and turning away as tears begin to form at the corners of her eyes. Lance appears to be torn between continuing to fret over Keith and going to comfort her. He seems as though he’s stuck in the threshold between both things, unsure of which direction might be the most pertinent right now.

But Shiro doesn’t have time to lament over that. He rushes by, straight past his fellow Paladins and meets Coran outside of the door, who seems to have been waiting for him. He’s already aware of the fact that they need the med bay immediately, leads him through the halls that his frantic brain might not have been able to navigate properly, and assists him in setting Keith down on the table once they get there.

“These wounds don’t look to be fatal,” Coran tells him, once they get Keith undressed, once Coran begins smoothing a salve over Keith’s mutilated chest, “From the look of some of these old scars, it appears that this wasn’t infrequent either. I’m not entirely sure what sorts of experiments they were doing on Keith, but it seems as though they would heal him periodically after. Wounds like these wouldn’t have healed on their own. You must have interrupted them before they mended him this time. The poor boy, he seems… he seems as though he’s been through a lot.”

Shiro’s throat feels dry when he swallows. He feels as though he’s rubbing sand over sandpaper. He watches Keith’s expression screwing up in pain, as Coran takes the stitches from the med bag and begins twining them through his skin. True to their supernatural, alien nature nature, they seem to move on their own. They’re more advanced than the ones that he remembers from back home. They tighten, before blending in with his skin. They mend the broken flesh almost immediately, leaving little to no trace of themselves behind.

Shiro watches this with much interest, for a moment. He barely even registers the fact that Coran is still talking.

“It does in fact look a lot worse than it is. With a few weeks of bedrest, he should be good as new, cryopod or no cryopod!”

Shiro nods, his brows furrowing together. A few weeks is still a long time. Keith has never been very good at being patient. He’s never been very good at accepting the idea that sometimes, he’s allowed to be weak.

Once Keith seems to be stabilized, this raises the question of where he’ll sleep. His old bedroom is still empty—stripped of his very few belongings, with fresh sheets and clean linens, compliments of a nervous cleaner such as Hunk. Shiro knows that Hunk has been keeping Keith’s things tidy for him—waiting for the day that hopefully, Keith might again return to the team. He knows that they’ve all felt Keith’s extended absence rippling through them—that despite that fact that even Keith himself might consider himself to be nothing more than a silent backdrop among the rest of these loud, loving, boisterous people, they’ve felt the hollow of his body and his few words missing among them more intensely than they could have ever comprehended.

Coran seems to think that a clean, sterile room such as Keith’s will be the best place for him. Shiro scoops Keith up then, careful not to jostle his newly mended wounds. He carries him first to the bathroom, where he peels him out of his filthy clothes—where he struggles to keep his eyes only where they need to be at any given moment, and not to linger too long on all of those purpling bruises, the jutting bones, the scars and scratches that he doesn’t remember littering Keith’s body before this.

He cleans Keith, takes a brief moment to wash his hair. He’s gentle with him, as he feels that he should have been all along. His guilt is so tangible now that he feels as though he could slice through it with a knife.

Keith’s knife, too, he knows, is being kept safe on the Blade of Marmora base. After they’d recovered it, the Blades had claimed that they couldn’t allow their weapons to fall into the wrong hands. But Shiro hadn’t missed the peculiar firmness in Kolivan’s jaw, the tightness of his browline as he’d held Keith’s knife with the utmost tenderness and care. Shiro had wondered then if Keith knew what it felt like to have a father—a man more than a fuzzy memory sleeping somewhere in a regretful past. He’d wondered if Kolivan had ever had a family of his own.

And he’d wondered if the two of them even knew that they’d found each other—in this confusion and this violence, in the overhanging, persistent turmoil of an intergalactic war. If they had any inkling of an idea that perhaps they’d needed the same things from each other—a father, and a son. A found family even in the deepest trenches of this chaotic new life.

Shiro can relate to that feeling easily, as he dries Keith off and slips him into a silky robe. He can’t remember Keith ever wearing his as Lance has always paraded around in his own.

But he understands the regretful notion of hindsight. Of knowing, only once someone is gone, exactly what the shape of that hole in your life might look like.

He can’t imagine that Keith doesn’t understand it. He’s lost so many things, so many people, since he was born, that he must constantly be painfully aware of how much it will hurt once every new person who he meets is someday gone.

He knows that Keith—silent, reliable, never one to complain—must be a master of loss by now. That thought doesn’t sit easily in the depths of his belly. He doesn’t like considering that he might be just another check on that long list of people who have abandoned Keith when he needed them.

Keith is still warm in his arms—still too light and too frail and fragile as he carries him from the bathroom to his bedroom. It feels strange to wander in this specific direction—to venture further than Lance’s bedroom door, to take these tentative steps towards the sarcophagus that Keith left behind here—a dark, quiet space that smells too much like him, with the residual memories of Keith somehow branded into every surface of the walls and floors.

Shiro has only come into Keith’s room once since he’s been back. And he’d been overwhelmed then—by the ghost of Keith clinging to the walls. By the energy of him still popping in the dead air.

He’d been hit with a gust of Keith’s smell—heady and heavy, musky and fresh—of some semblance of warmth that he’d left behind.

Shiro had felt then as though he’d been possessed by whatever piece of his spirit Keith had left behind. He’d felt, in that moment, so consumed with sadness that he hadn’t even been able to breathe.

He’d allowed this to happen. He’d been too weak to stop even a single part of this.

Keith, now sleeping soundly in his arms—so small and battered and weak—he’s searched the ends of the universe. He’s fought, and he’s struggled, and he’s been a perpetual, unyielding comfort to Shiro all this time.

And Shiro knows that he failed Keith. He knows that, when it really mattered, he let Keith down.

The door to Keith’s room slides open. It seems, now that Keith has returned, that the angry spirits left in his absence have died away.

Now, it’s just quiet. Now, it’s just cold.

But Keith doesn’t stir when he sets him onto the mattress, when he pulls the blankets over him. He breathes, short and shallow—snores very lightly as his features smooth out and the tension in his brows ebbs away. He seems more comfortable, not being carried around. Shiro knows that he’s never been familiar enough with the concept of it to be comfortable with being touched.

Even in sleep, Shiro wonders if Keith is capable of being uneasy with it.

Before he leaves, before he steps out of the room to put himself to bed and wait for Keith to feel better in the morning, something stops him.

Something compels him to hesitate even when the door slides open again.

He peers back at Keith slumbering peacefully, at the sight of his frail body and the sharp indentations of his bones pressed up through the blankets. The shadows in the shallow crevices where there should be more fat—the dry and chapped lips. The deep, dark circles under his eyes.

Shiro knows that he owes Keith the universe, if only to make up for all of this.

And he knows that Keith deserves everything good—to make up for the sorry hand that he’s been dealt so far in life.

So he stays, for tonight. He makes himself comfortable sitting on the floor, his arms and chin propped up on the open edge of the mattress.

He tells himself that he just wants to make sure that Keith is safe for tonight, so that he doesn’t awaken, confused and afraid and alone, in the middle of the night. That Coran wasn’t wrong, and Keith won’t be okay.

He only wants to make sure that all of this will still be real in the morning.

This lie is enough to comfort him into sleep. It’s enough to compel him to feel okay staying, just for tonight.

But he doesn’t go back to his own room, ever again.

And after enough time passes, he stops questioning why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was requested by the very lovely [Dracosh](http://dracosh50.tumblr.com)! It’s been a very huge honor bringing this idea to life for her, and I really hope you guys enjoyed the first chapter! Chapter two will be posted next week, so I’ll see you again soon!  
> Until then, thank you so much for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art for this chapter is drawn by the lovely [mai](https://googlyeyeseyes123.tumblr.com/)!

In the control room of the castleship, with tomorrow’s battle looming over their heads like an ever-present specter, Keith reaches out a comforting hand, doing his best to emulate the sort of comfort that he imagines one normal person might give another, in the presence of such innumerable stressors.

Shiro flinches, for only a fraction of a moment, shirks away only slightly from the warmth of Keith’s palm bleeding through the fabric of his sleeve, as though he never would expect for being touched by another person to result in anything but pain. Keith knows better than to pull away. He fights against his instincts, against his flighty body screaming at him to withdraw his hand and wrap up more safely within himself.

He knows that Shiro needs to be comforted now. He knows that Shiro has so much weight on his shoulders, and he’d never share it, never shrug it off for anyone else to carry, without someone pushing his boundaries, without someone pressing the issue until he’s forced to disclose his feelings and clear the thick fog dulling his senses and distancing him from the world that they exist in—here and now.

Keith knows that his own, personal sense of ease is less important than making Shiro feel better now. He knows, undoubtedly, that whatever must be swirling around in Shiro’s head must be more profound than anything that he’s ever felt in his life.

And Shiro needs him—Keith _wants_ to be needed by him. He wants nothing more than to be helpful here, to be a shoulder to lean on, something soft and gentle and kind, in a universe that for so long has been nothing but cruel to such a altruistic person as Shiro.

So he keeps his hand in place, offers the most convincing smile that he can possibly craft onto his embarrassingly untrained lips. Any words that he might want to say are lodged deep down in his windpipe. He chokes on them, awkward and far too loud, clearing his throat and flicking his gaze away, just as Shiro looks towards him and he can feel heat rising to his cheeks.

“Tomorrow is a big day,” Shiro tells him then—his words even, his tone trained. But Keith knows him well enough to sense the tension there. He knows him well enough to translate these words into the fear that they’re trying so feebly to hide. “Tomorrow, everything could really be over.”

“We could go home,” Keith offers, staring hard through the front windows—picking through the deep black of an empty universe and training his gaze to Shiro’s reflection against the glass.

Shiro pushes out a deep breath. He reaches up, grasping Keith’s wrist gently in his warm, human hand. Keith’s gaze finds him again. He finds himself drowning in the dark pools of Shiro’s eyes—in the small upturning of his lips, in the soft, pink flush under his skin.

“Listen—”

Keith cuts him off abruptly. He’s standing up on the tips of his toes, pressing a kiss hard and sloppy and so embarrassingly inexperienced against Shiro’s lips. He doesn’t know what’s come over him now. He doesn’t know why—in this miserable quiet, in the fretful energy popping in the air around them, in the small space of peace in the final night before they set out to fight Zarkon—with Allura having collected what she needed from the Balmera, Slav having helped power the teludav, everyone having worked so hard to bring everything together so perfectly—why all that Keith can offer Shiro now is something so inappropriate, so poorly timed and absolutely abhorrent as this stupid, impromptu kiss.

But it feels good, it feels warm. And Shiro is just as soft as he’s always dreamed. His hand trembles slightly as it locks around Keith’s wrists. His breath is hot as it fans against Keith’s pink-stained cheeks. Keith can feel their twin pulses pounding in the small space between them. He can feel them, connected here, tethered together by their own loneliness and fear during this short lapse of privacy, away from the judgmental eyes of their team.

After a brief moment of shocked silence, Shiro’s hands press firmly against his shoulders, and he’s quickly pushed away.

“K-Keith, I can’t—”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“No, n-no, Keith, listen.” Shiro has untangled himself completely now. He’s stepped back and wrapped his arms around himself, as though to protect his dignity from Keith’s awful, inappropriate advances. “It’s—it’s not that, I just… I can’t… I… I think we should talk about this later.”

Shiro won’t look him in the eye.

He won’t talk about it further than just those few, stilted words.

And the scene shifts, suddenly. The world around Keith warps to the black throat of deep space—to the lights of lasers flashing between the stars. To all of them—connected as Voltron, to Shiro, screaming as Zarkon clasps his mighty armored hands on either side of Voltron’s face.

Then there’s an empty pilot’s seat in the Black Lion. There’s no hint of Shiro left scattered out among the stars. There are weeks and months of searching fruitlessly, wondering why he’d messed up so fantastically, wondering why he couldn’t have made the last night that he’d spend with Shiro _mean something_ , without ruining everything, once again, as he’s always managed to do.

There’s Shiro, returned—starving and dehydrated, half dead in a small Galra escape pod, floating aimlessly in the dark vacuum of space.

There’s that _look_ , that awful, hateful expression—that glare, so full of disdain, as though Keith might be the lowest lifeform in the galaxy. There’s the yelling, the disagreements. There’s Shiro pushing him away from the team, telling him in actions more than words that he’s let him down once more. He’s failed all of them, ruined whatever Shiro might have left behind for him to nurture here.

Shiro trusted the team in his hands during his absence, and he allowed every part of it to fall so dreadfully, so irreparably apart.

And there are the _eyes_. The bright, yellow, unyielding stares, peering into him, looking right through him. Picking him apart and scrutinizing him. Finding the most tender parts of him, deep down inside of his chest, in his heart, in his lungs and in the marrow of his bones. The eyes and the fingers, tearing him open, pouring something cold and evil into every crevice that they can find. There are needles and knives, there are claw-like fingers poking into his flesh, laughter—crisp and cracking, voices, drilled down deep into the tattered remains his tarnished skin.

There’s a blurry, indecipherable world—a cell so small and cold, and barely enough food to eat to keep him awake for more than a few hours a day.

There’s someone asking him so many questions—questions that he knows better than to answer. They hurt him when he stays quiet, but he knows that keeping silent is the only thing that he has left to offer his team.

There’s Shiro, during one sole transmission, telling his captors to keep him, because he’s let them down. He’s too irresponsible. He’s not worth the trouble, worth the effort, worth the pain.

Haggar’s wicked smile is bright and blurry. She tells him,

_“There’s no one in the entire galaxy who wants you, soldier. You might as well give in.”_

Keith jolts awake. For a terrifying moment, it’s dark and he doesn’t know where he is.

He can’t breathe now, can’t seem to catch his breath. His heart is pounding in his chest, his skin feels clammy, sweaty and cold. He’s shaking so hard that he can hear the springs in the mattress rattling underneath him. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know where he’s been. How he got here, how long it’s been since that Shiro-soldier carried him away.

He doesn’t know why nothing hurts like it should—why the wounds in his chest aren’t healed. Why he’s not on the floor in his cell, why his tunic feels softer, not nearly as in shambles as it usual is. He feels warm, feels as though he should recognize this space around him if only his blurry eyes could focus on anything, if only he could breathe.

He knows that he needs to get out of here. He’ll hyperventilate, if he stays put.

This isn’t his cell. In the dark, he can’t tell where he is anymore.

So he stumbles out of bed, braces himself against the walls as his shaky legs barely manage to carry him. He can’t get Shiro’s face out of his head. He can’t stop thinking about that horrible kiss. He can’t stop reminding himself of that sole moment, when he’d ruined everything—can’t stop considering all of the reasons why this is all his fault, why he deserves this, and why, for whatever reason, he isn’t even deserving of the final release and relief of death.

The hall, once the door slides open, is too bright. Everything is bleary and unsteady. Everything is shaking entirely too hard. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he still can’t breathe. He stumbles by doors, braces himself, stumbles and nearly falls.

He feels as though he might be sick, but his stomach is empty, he knows. He retches a few times, coughing up nothing but phlegm and blood.

A weak attempt to wipe off his face, before he stumbles and braces himself again, leaves a small streak of his blood on the wall. He knows that he’s making things too easy for them to find him, when they discover that he’s gone.

He doesn’t know what will happen when they realize that he’s tried to escape. He doesn’t know if they’ll hurt him more, if they’ll finally kill him, if they’ll laugh and allow him to go.

If they’ll know that he can’t possibly survive much longer like this. He’d have no hope of piloting a ship now without wrecking it.

But he needs to breathe. He needs to find himself somewhere more open, more quiet, less bright.

_He needs to breathe._

At the end of the long hall, a door slides open as he passes. He tumbles inside of it without thinking—without considering the danger of it. He doesn’t even care what happens to him now. He doesn’t care if it’s filled with more of Haggar’s minions. He doesn’t care if they draw their weapons and kill him on the spot.

He’s on his hands and knees, having spilled onto the slick tile, without anything solid to grasp onto. He crawls forward, gasping for air. He presses a palm to his throat, struggling to force oxygen in and out. His vision is spotting, dark around the edges. He feels like he might die here.

And Shiro’s face, Shiro’s words—they whip around in his thoughts. He can feel a warm wetness on his cheeks, and he’s saying something—something too loud, something choked and scratchy, untrained in a voice that he hasn’t used in months.

He tries to force himself to even out his breathing. He tries to force himself to think of anything else but Shiro, again and again. Shiro’s handsome face illuminated by a sunset back at the Garrison. Shiro smiling and laughing, clapping a firm hand against his shoulder. Shiro so washed out and so much bigger, strapped down to that Garrison medical table. Shiro asking him, in that small, hushed murmur of a voice, _“How many times are you going to have to rescue me?”_

Shiro, a deep recess of a gaping wound left right in the center of his life. Shiro, pushing him away when he’d kissed him.

Shiro, his features warped in disgust, telling Haggar that there’s no good reason to rescue Keith. Shiro, turning off that transmission without even sparing him a glance.

And he’s sorry, so desperately, overwhelmingly sorry. He wishes that he could talk to Shiro, just one last time. He wishes that he could explain to him how painfully clear it is that he messed up. He wishes that he could go back to that moment, before everything was ruined—and that _he_ could disappear instead. He wishes that he could erase everything single mistake that’s he’s made over the last few years that they’ve spent together.

That he could reach inside of his heart and smother these ugly feelings. That he could convince himself, once and for all, that Shiro doesn’t want him, doesn’t need him, and he’s only going to continue hurting both of them if he keeps clinging so vigorously to these selfish, childish feelings of his.

He’s done nothing but leave rampant destruction in his path. He’s done nothing but ruin everything that the team has so carefully built up around them.

He wishes that he could die now, that he could sleep now, that everything could just stop. He just can’t catch his breath. He can’t stop thinking, can’t stop drowning here, in the harsh glow of the lights overhead, in the blur of his own tears, in the repulsive crowing of his own strangled cries.

He’s sobbing now, terrified. He can’t breathe, can’t speak, can’t do more than lie here on the floor in some too-bright, too wet room. He’s shaking so terribly that he feels as though the world around him will never be stable again.

At the peak of this, as he feels himself slipping again into unconsciousness, he can barely register the door behind him sliding open. He hopes that the Galra soldiers come to find him have drawn their guns. He hopes the feel the barrel of one pressed against the base of his skull, and he hopes, that finally, all of this can be over.

Instead, he hears a voice, feels the warmth of a hand on his shoulder.

“Keith?”

It sounds too much like Shiro.

Of course, his imagination will never allow any of this to finally fade away.

 

* * *

 

Shiro stirs, noting the stiffness in his back and shoulders as he clears his throat and blinks the sleep from his eyes, pulling one numb arm from the mattress to wipe a sluggish hand over his face. Momentarily, he doesn’t quite remember where he is. Briefly, he wonders if he’d sleep walked, or fallen out of bed.

But the memories of today rush back to him. The Galra base, Haggar’s ship, the lions, and Keith.

He scrambles, terrified, when he peers onto the mattress and finds that Keith is gone.

He’s on his feet in no time, barreling out of the room into the hall. There’s no sign of where Keith might have gone at first, until he spots a streak of blood against the wall, beyond their rooms, headed towards the fork at the end of the hall.

Keith could have ventured towards the healing pods, in one direction, but Shiro doesn’t think that’s very likely. He could have, instead, headed for the kitchen, but Shiro isn’t sure if he’s ever been the sort of person to get out of bed when he’s hungry at night, even in perfect health.

Just before he makes a decision, from the direction of the bathroom to his left, he hears it—the shuddered breaths, the sobbing, a pitiful, cracked voice apologizing, anguished and breathless and so familiar that the sound of it rushes ice through his veins.

He feels his stomach drop. He feels his heart pulsing wildly, lodged high up in his throat.

He steps forward, burying all of his fear, his guilt, his anger at himself and everyone who let Keith down, deep into his chest. He compartmentalizes these feelings—these selfish things that he isn’t even entirely sure that he deserves to feel. And his heart thunders as he waits for the door to slide open—as he spots, sitting wrapped up around himself in a trembling ball on the floor—a mop of shaggy, damp dark hair, trembling, narrow shoulders, the bumps of a spine far too pronounced through the fabric of a silky red robe.

It’s Keith, once again, shivering, but safe and real and _still here_. Shiro lets out a shallow gasp of relief.

“Keith?” He nearly reels backwards when Keith flinches at the sound of his voice—when the mantra of apologies tumbling out of his mouth pause, slow, then fade away completely.

He steps forward once, carefully. He bends downward, reaching out a tentative hand and resting it on Keith’s shaking shoulder. Keith doesn’t shirk away from him, he doesn’t cry out, doesn’t fight it. For a moment, Shiro allows himself to be foolish enough to truly believe that Keith remembers him. For a split second, he’s naive enough to think that everything could possibly be okay.

“...Keith?”

But Keith’s shaking increases tenfold, when Shiro rounds him, when he kneels down before Keith and places both hands on his shoulders. He can see even under Keith’s overgrown bangs, even beneath the deep shadows cast from the lights overhead, that Keith has been crying. His gaze is glassy and unfocused. There’s an angry red flush, bright and raw, under both of his eyes.

Shiro feels his breath catch in his throat. He feels his chest pinch—feels his heartbeat floundering as he grapples with the emotions that he should feel.

“K—Keith, Keith it’s me,” He forces out, his voice rough and untrained, strained with his own fear and misery, at the mere discontent that he feels in the wake of witnessing his strongest friend coming so completely unraveled, “Keith, it’s Shiro. I need you to breathe, buddy, okay? Can you take some deep breaths for me?”

Keith’s head jerks upward so quickly that it catches Shiro off guard. He’s staring at Shiro with a shocking intensity—his tiny, fruitless gulps for air growing more strained, more quiet. The dulled edges of his fingernails crawl up to grasp Shiro by each wrist.

Only the human one feels it. Only his flesh arm can prickle at the sensation of being touched. He wishes so desperately, even after all of this time, that he were human enough to feel all of Keith at once. That he had been smart enough, brave enough, even before Kerberos, to deny himself access to that mission and stay back on Earth with the only person who would stick by him undoubtedly through everything that would inevitably follow.

He wishes that he’d had to foresight to understand how much Keith would mean to him someday—how he wouldn’t always be around. How someday, in a distant, murky future, Keith would reach out for his assistance, for the first time in his life, and he wouldn’t be there to help Keith, how Keith had always reliably been there to help him.

He shakes his head. Now isn’t the time to feel sorry for himself. Now isn’t the time to delve ever-deeper into the recesses of his own self hatred or regret. Now is Keith’s time—Keith’s moment, finally, to be provided the comfort that he’s so often denied.

Shiro, resisting the urge to pull away, pulls Keith closer instead.

For the first time since Shiro stumbled in here, he hears Keith draw in a deep, long breath. And following after, so many more until Shiro is content that he’s finally taking in oxygen. His breathing evens out, he’s hiccuping slightly, his face wet against Shiro’s shoulder. He’s still shaking, still murmuring something so quiet that Shiro can’t make it out, still too small and too angular, too light compared to Shiro’s memories of harder, firmer, subtle muscle.

The Galra have robbed them both of their humanity now. Keith, too small, too frail, too fragile. Shiro, too big, too clumsy, too dangerous.

He almost laughs. After all this time of feeling as though he’d never be good enough to relate to someone as perfect as Keith, finally, they make the perfect pair.

“Sh-Shiro?”

Keith’s voice is the feeble twisting of a leaf in a hurricane. It’s so weak and whispered that Shiro barely hears it at all.

“I’m here, Keith,” Shiro tells him, burying his face in Keith’s shoulder, resisting the urge to kiss every piece of skin that he can find.

He’s so relieved now, to finally have Keith back. He feels as though the universe has been set right—as though, finally, he can begin the long journey of righting all of the wrongs that he left scattered in his destructive path.

“I—I’m sorry, Shiro,” Keith tells him, his words staggered and wet, “I wasn’t—I wasn’t good enough, and I—I—”

“You’re perfect, Keith. You—you did perfectly fine. You did so well. I’m so, so proud of you.”

Keith chokes something that might be a sob. Against Shiro’s shirt, he feels more wetness soaking in the fabric. He swallows thickly, willing back the moisture in his own eyes. Telling himself to be strong, to be here for Keith. To be the person who Keith deserves, for the very first time in his miserable wreck of a life.

Keith deserves this now, more than anyone else.

Keith deserves to be comforted when he’s weak. He deserves to be loved by someone who he loves too.

He deserves to heal, finally, after everything that he’s lived through, silently, without complaint.

Keith is gripping his wrists tightly now, shuddering hard against him. He pulls his head back, his wet cheek pressed against Shiro’s, where his head is still buried in Keith’s shoulder.

“But you—you—when Haggar called you, you told her—”

Shiro pulls back too, dragging his hands from Keith’s shoulders to his face, encasing it gently in his grip. His thumbs wipe away some of the dampness there—he finds himself, momentarily, lost in the murky pools of Keith’s dark eyes.

These eyes, he remembers fondly. Filled with passion and determination—the sole memory that had compelled him to survive the Gladiator matches after Kerberos. The single piece of humanity that he’d retained while sleeping in the astral plane.

Keith’s eyes—his smile, his soft voice, his strong arms—Shiro remembers him perfectly. Shiro knows, without a doubt, that he couldn’t have survived anything that he’s lived through so far without the memory of Keith to carry him through.

“I—I can’t explain right now, Keith, not—not all at once. I-I don’t think you’re ready to hear it yet, but… that wasn’t me, Keith. I never would have talked about you like that. I never would have hurt you like that, but I’m… I’m so sorry, I—I promise, I’ll make it up to you, but… you need to come back to bed. You need to get better so I can explain everything.”

Keith nods easily, allowing Shiro to shift to his feet and lift him into his arms. He knows that a healthier Keith would be fighting this. He knows that the old Keith wouldn’t have allowed anyone to see him while he was this weak. But he welcomes this Keith, anyway. He revels in the idea that, even without meaning to, Keith always makes everything as easy for him as possible.

He’s thankful now, that Keith can be so good to him—even when all that Shiro wants is to repay the favor.

He carries Keith back to bed. And before he even slides him back underneath the blankets, Keith has fallen asleep.

 

* * *

 

It’s been two weeks since Keith returned from—

Lance pauses, tipping his head to the side and drawing a hand to his chin. Actually, he isn’t entirely sure where they’d found him. He isn’t sure what they’d call that tiny, unassuming ship-base-prison combination that Haggar had been hiding out on, holding Keith captive with the help of her remaining cronies and doing God-knows what to him to gather information.

He shakes his head, dragging a hand through his sleep-tousled hair. He’d cursed wildly when the Red Lion’s energy had awoken him from sleep. He’d begged and bartered, ranted and raved—pleading with it just to let him get a few more hours of rest before it started pestering him with space-science-semi-supernatural nonsense once again.

 _“I’m just a Paladin during the day, Red!”_ He’d cried, his voice bouncing against the empty walls of the bathroom where he’d washed off his face mask in the sink, _“But night time? That’s Lance Time, got it?! This is the first and last time that I’m dragging myself out to your hangar at too-dang-early in the morning just to see whatever crazy mumbo jumbo you’re so upset about!”_

He isn’t even sure if the Red Lion can hear him. He isn’t sure, even still, if their bond works like that. But of all the lions, considering what they’ve seen of Red’s bond with Keith in the past, perhaps it would be the most likely of all of them to have some kind of long distance connection to its Paladin's thoughts.

Maybe, it can even understand the words that he’s howling madly in the bathroom as he tosses his towel in the sink, wiping off his hands on his robe and tearing through the door and down the hall in the direction of the hangers.

Red wasn’t exactly trying to wake him up, he thinks. It’s not like he’s ever been able to hear any clear communication beyond some bits and pieces of instinct, suggestion, and wild purring from any of the lions. Pidge and Hunk don’t seem to have any conversations with their lions either, but he muses, Keith had been known in the past to address them as though they could actually understand.

And Lance, himself, isn’t above having a soft conversation of his own with Red and Blue when the right mood strikes.

Red, more about the mundane—about his continuous, barely more than professional relationship with said lion. And with Blue, just a few fleeting interactions in which he reassures her that he still misses her, and he wishes more than anything that they could be together again.

It’s been a couple of years now, he muses, and this alignment still feels wrong. And he knows that Allura is feeling it too—that she’s all but outgrown her spot as a Paladin, and it seems lately as though the position is only holding her back.

They hadn’t been sure what to do about any of it, but the war was already so close to being over. Zarkon was dead, and now Haggar is dead—and gradually, they’ve begun taking out all of the Galra rebels who have stood in their way. They’ve made a slow journey through creating peace in the universe, a gradual drag of time that still feels just as uncomfortable without Keith, without the original Shiro, as it had all the way back when Shiro first disappeared.

They haven’t quite addressed this whole Keith situation in more than a few words. Keith is still healing, still slowly getting better. And it seems as though no one is quite ready to bring it up until he’s strong enough to contribute his opinion as well.

Lance isn’t sure how he would feel, in Keith’s position. He imagines that Earth soldiers are discharged from the military after being tortured—given purple hearts, or some other honor for withstanding something so terrible, and they’re definitely never expected to fight ever again.

He imagines, that if he were Keith, he’d think that he’d finally done enough. He’d been a Paladin of two lions. He’d fought with an ally army doing more dangerous, more risky and less rewarding work.

And he’d been captured for months, put through unimaginable torture. He’d survived that, somehow, without ever giving any of their secrets away.

But he isn’t sure what Keith would want to do, if he wasn’t still fighting this war.

As he nears the entrance to the hanger, he realizes that Keith wouldn’t have anywhere to return to, if they’d actually decided to send him home.

That thought sits, uneasy, in his belly.

Just as he passes through the doors, without paying attention to his surroundings, he bumps into another body just over the threshold.

He reels back, throwing his hands up in front of him and immediately sputtering out a dozen incoherent apologies. He’s too flustered right now to react with his usual bravado, too tired and stressed about Keith, about Red and Blue, about Shiro and Haggar and the unceasing worry that more Galra are still lurking somewhere out there, hurting more people—but once he pulls himself out of his thoughts and his fear, his own nervousness and discontent, he realizes that the person who’s turned around to greet him is Allura. She’s struggling to look somber, but doing a poor job of hiding the flush on her cheeks, and the small upturning of her lips.

“Did you feel it too, Lance?” She asks, “The strange energy emanating from the lions?”

Lance swallows, straightening his posture and scratching the base of his neck.

“U-uh, yeah, uh… Red is having a fit. What—what’s going on?”

She shakes her head, turning momentarily back to peer deeper into the darkness of the unlit hanger.

“Blue awoke me from a strange dream that I had—about you, actually,” she tells him, “it was different from the dreams that I usually have about you—I—I mean it wasn’t—it wasn’t a completely regular dream for me to have, as in—”

She cuts herself off, immediately flustered. Lance feels his own cheeks heating up, and despite the hundreds of sleazy pick-up lines swirling around in his thoughts, he can’t bring himself to say a single one of them.

“I had a dream that the two of us were piloting Blue together,” she tells him, “but at the end of the dream, I told you, _‘This is rather cramped isn’t it?’_ before Blue’s mouth opened and I stepped outside. When I awoke, Blue’s energy was calling to me. I wasn’t sure if the two were related, but now, you’re here as well…”

Lance clears his throat.

“I wonder what that means?”

Allura laughs lightly, stepping back to run her hand over the wall. When she finds the manual switch, the lights power on—and in the distance, in its usual spot, Lance watches as Red seems to be moving on its own.

“I wondered the same thing,” she tells him, “But it seems that the rightful Paladin has found his way back to the Red Lion. I think Blue is calling you back home.”

There’s a strange look to Allura then—something sad, something solemn. Something excited too, as though she isn’t quite as upset about the prospect of this as he would have expected—and for a moment, he’s caught in the realization that both of them have grown. Like Shiro, like Keith, they’ve discovered that there’s more to all of this than the glory, than the lions, than living up to expectations or making their more selfish dreams come true. They’ve realized, on their own difficult journeys, that their original positions in the universe might have been where they belonged all along.

But to be content, he thinks, maybe, they needed to get what they wanted first.

They needed to learn, along the way, that glory wasn’t all that they’d built it up to be.

Allura, he knows, is bigger and better than any of them. She’s stronger than a Paladin, she’s more important than just a soldier. She’s meant for something great, something that’s so much more than this.

And from the way that she’s looking at him now, he wonders if she feels the same way about him.

Lance knows that he doesn’t have time to lament about this, not right now. He offers Allura a gentle hand on her shoulder, as the two of them silently agree to move forward. The Red Lion is purring now—the sound of its voice growing more distant in Lance’s thoughts.

And he feels sad too, just a little. He already mourns the idea that he’ll be giving this up, as well.

But they draw closer, pass by the Blue Lion, whose eyes, once again, seem to be following him across the room. And just as they reach Red, it lowers its mighty head, pressing its chin to the floor and opening its mouth, as though to invite them inside.

With his hand sliding down to grasp Allura’s, Lance takes the first step inside.

When they climb through the throat, through the narrow tunnel into the cockpit, they’re met with the sight of Keith’s back, facing them from the pilot’s seat. His hands are hovering over the controls—shaking and frail, paler than Lance thinks his skin has ever been before.

Seeing Keith now still feels like seeing a ghost. Watching him move around—just similar enough that Lance recognizes him, but so different that he seems to be no more than another clone, another copy, just as the last Shiro had been—it makes something heavy and uncomfortable roil in the depths of Lance’s belly.

He promises himself that he’ll mull over all of this later. He’ll talk to Allura, and make sure that she’s okay.

But for now, he needs to speak to Keith. He needs to make Keith understand that all of this is okay.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Lance asks suddenly, tactless, but at a loss for words.

Keith immediately jerks around, craning his neck to peer at them over the edge of the seat.

“Lance! Allura, I… I thought—I woke up and I felt like—”

“Like some energy was dragging you in here?”

Keith is silent for a moment. Allura, next to Lance, is quivering with a nervous energy, pressing herself more firmly to his side.

Allura has never been very good at talking to someone like Keith, Lance knows. The two of them have been perpetually at odds, no matter how well-meaning they’ve been in their approaches, in their misguided attempts to connect to one another over the years that they’ve both inhabited this castle.

Awkwardly fumbling, never coming together at exactly the right moment. Lance doesn’t have time right now to consider that maybe his ease with other people is something that Keith might have envied in him. He doesn’t have the opportunity, while Keith is still staring at him, to contemplate that perhaps he’s wasted many years aspiring to be someone who didn’t really like themselves either.

“Yeah,” Lance says, drawing further into the room, “We felt it too. We thought maybe someone was tampering with the lions, and I guess that someone was you.”

Keith opens his mouth to object.

Lance raises his free hand.

“No, nope, sorry dude. There’s no getting out of this one. You came in here and fiddled around with my lion, and now you gotta accept the consequences.”

Keith is gaping at him as though he’s grown a second head. With Allura pulled behind him by their still-connected hands, Lance comes close enough that he can set his free palm against the control panel.

Keith has been putting on more weight lately—finally comfortable enough to eat, to take short walks around the castle before he becomes too sore or tired. His skin has taken on a more healthy tone, since Shiro pried him from that operating table, since he carried him into the castle and everyone had thought—with mistaken absolution—that Keith couldn’t possibly survive the night.

He still refuses to enter the healing pods—still screams and lashes out, still pitches a fit so terrible that Lance can almost imagine how ugly of a life he must have left behind. Shiro is strange during those moments, stone faced and silent. He accepts Keith’s refusal to heal easier. He allows him to continue denying himself an easier way out.

Lance isn’t sure how he would feel if one of his loved ones declined the opportunity to stop suffering. If Allura were dying, and she denied herself an antidote, he isn’t sure if his love for her would be strong enough that he’d allow her to die on her own terms.

But Keith, it seems, isn’t going to die any time soon. His health is still in a precarious stage—Coran and Shiro still need to change his bandages every day, still need to pump him with so much medicine that sometimes he seems like nothing more than a zombie lurching through the halls.

But he’s healing, slowly. Suffering, definitely, but getting better all the same.

He’s well enough, now, it seems, that he’s managed to awaken Red—that he’s come to reclaim the throne within it that Lance never thought he’d ever need to surrender to anyone.

There’s a part of him that’s relieved. He can feel it in Allura too.

Things feel as though they’re finally clicking back into place. As though they’re mending their collective broken edges with gold—stronger and more beautiful than they could have ever been before this. It feels to Lance as though everything that’s felt so terribly wrong for so long is finally going back to normal.

Years ago, before they ever embarked on this journey, before they even volunteered to fight in this dangerous, gruesome war, he never would have considered that he’d willingly, excitedly, give up any opportunity to fight with Keith. He never would have thought that he’d someday be so relieved to have him around.

But the years have molded the two of them into different people. Lance, into a man willing to admit his own shortcomings, willing to evolve, to change, to thrive even in the darkest barren reaches of an unforgiving universe.

And Keith, slowly becoming more human than Lance could have ever imagined him when he saw him for the first time. Learning to love, to mourn, and to accept that people can care about him, and that they really, truly want to have him around.

Keith is still watching Lance warily, as Lance gazes out of Red’s windshield—out into the dark hangar, out into the shadows yielding nothing more than a blank canvas for him to paint with his many thoughts. The timed lights have flicked off again, without enough movement to keep the motion sensors alive. It’s just the three of them now, in the silence and the night. It’s just Keith still watching Lance as though he expects to be reprimanded, Allura, quiet and still, as though she still has yet to grasp how to properly address this situation, and Lance, himself, with one hand on the controls, his head in the clouds, and the final absolution that he needs to understand that this is the last night that he’ll spend inside of the Red Lion.

He turns his gaze back to Keith.

“Red wants you back,” he tells Keith, “and there’s no way for you to weasel your way outta this one, got it? I’m not gonna be nice if you leave Red again—he’s missed you. If you run away again, I promise I’ll kick your ass myself!”

Keith’s smile is radiant. It’s the brightest light in the shadowed cockpit of the lion.

Allura grasps Lance’s hand tighter, Keith finally lowers his fingers to the controls.

In the dark silence of the night, the Red Lion roars to life.

 

* * *

 

Keith’s hand, under Shiro’s, is small.

It’s calloused in a way that Shiro thinks might take years before it could ever return to something softer, something more normal. His nails are short and blunted. They’re jagged in places, as though he’s never taken the time to file them. His hands are dotted with silvery scars. There’s a deeper one drawn jagged over the webbing between his thumb and pointer finger—long and ugly and so painful looking, but it’s familiar.  Shiro recognizes it from all of the samurai documentaries that he remembers watching as a kid.

When unsheathing a blade, he knows that untrained fighters will sometimes cut themselves accidentally. He wonders, idly, how long it took before Keith learned not to do that anymore.

Keith has trained hard enough by now that he doesn’t cut himself on accident when drawing his knife. He’s careful and quick, graceful in fights where Shiro often mows down his opponents like a tank. But Keith is still littered with scars—like tiny, barely visible constellations. Over his bare shoulders, scattered along his back, his arms, his small hands. Shiro imagines that he might be able to trace them, to form a bigger picture. To understand, in some shape or form, why anyone would ever want to hurt someone as perfect as Keith.

The two of them are alone now in Keith’s quiet, empty bedroom. Shiro has unwoven the bandages from Keith back, volunteered to rub medicine over the healing gashes in his skin after cleaning the wounds before re-wrapping them. It’s taken a while for Keith to be comfortable enough with this process that he doesn’t need to be sedated. He’s come back to his senses, at the very least, that mending these cuts isn’t difficult, even though he still howls in agony at the mere sight of the healing pod.

Shiro isn’t sure if he’ll ever understand why.

But he recognizes that fear. He feels as though he’s seeing a mirror version of himself. He feels, when Keith tenses in his arms, as though the memories whipping around in Keith’s head, knocking the air from his lungs, and pushing those terrible, heartbreaking noises from his lips—maybe they’re better left in the past.

Maybe, as time goes on, Keith will learn to live with them, just as Shiro has learned to live with his own.

Unfortunately, Keith isn’t an open book. Shiro might not ever know even half of the things that he lived through, when he spent so much time in captivity.

In place of talking it out, Shiro concentrates on the physical wounds, which he knows that he can mend. He’s taken great care, in the previous three weeks, to touch Keith only as much as he’d felt comfortable being touched. He’d started by ghosting his fingers over the back of Keith’s hand—evolved gradually to small touches on his arm. He’d held him, only when he was in the throes of panic, only when giving him space absolutely wasn’t an option, only when he knew that Keith would have to forgive him, when he was in a clearer state of mind.

And now, after hours and days, three weeks of tireless work to gain his trust again—Shiro feels comfortable in this position. It feels like a new routine, the two of them spending these intimate moments together. Rubbing his salve-covered fingers over the ridged wounds in Keith’s skin, running his fingers idly over the bumps in his spine, and wondering how prominent all of these bones must have been before all of these horrible things happened.

“Shiro.”

Keith’s voice is soft, gruff and unpracticed. He’s been speaking even less lately than usual—sparingly, even when he should have spoken up. Sometimes, even when things are very wrong, even when even the slightest hint of a warning would only result in Shiro helping avoid whatever panic attack or rush of bad memories will come rushing back to him, totally unannounced.

He can’t blame Keith for being quiet. He knows that his own journey through the winding path of getting better was more daunting than well-meaning onlookers could ever understand. He makes a point of reminding Keith often that he’s allowed to take his time. He can do whatever he needs to do. No one is going to blame him now, no one is going to judge him.

And when everything is said and done, at the end of every long day, Shiro will always be here to watch over him while he sleeps.

Shiro hums his admission, removing one hand from Keith’s back to drizzle more salve onto his gloved fingers. He’d love to touch Keith, flesh to flesh—would love to feel the heat of him, just to remind himself that all of this is real. But he knows better. He doesn’t want the wounds to get infected. He doesn’t want Keith’s pain and discomfort to last any longer than it absolutely has to.

“I—I’m sorry.” Keith pauses, his voice suddenly lower, more forced. Shiro can feel his muscles tensing under his fingers. He can see the way that Keith’s sudden turmoil is straining painfully against the torn then mended edges of his skin. He resists the urge to tell Keith to calm down, to relax, lest he rip open his stitches again. “I just—with the other you, I… I should have known, right? I mean, he looked like you, but he wasn’t you, he wasn’t—”

Keith has turned around just enough to stare at him. His eyes are wide and glassy. He’s so panicked now that he’s trembling desperately under Shiro’s touch. Shiro can hear the tell-tale hitch in his voice, the shallow breaths that he’s struggling to draw in. And Shiro knows that he has to be smart about this—has to act fast, mend this situation before it results in another panic attack.

Instead of speaking, instead of ruining this moment further with clumsy, untrained words, he presses his palms more firmly on Keith’s shoulders, using the warmth of his touch to shock Keith into a sudden silence. Keith is predictable now, at the very least. The beginnings of his rant are cut short immediately.

Shiro smiles—kind, warm, and so desperately in love. He chases away all of his sadness, all of his anger and regret. He forces himself to focus only on how helplessly enamored he is with this man—this friend, this hero who has searched every end of the universe for him.

“There was no way that you could have known,” Shiro tells him, finally finding his voice, finally feeling so rooted to this moment, so at peace with the situations that have led them here—to finally connecting, on equal footing, on the same page, for the very first time, “He was a perfect duplicate—and he loved you too, just as much as I do. He didn’t mean to be that person, and I know… I know he did some terrible things, but… he was me, Keith. And I couldn’t ever blame you for not seeing the truth, because… if I were you, I don’t think I would have either.”

Keith flicks his gaze away, his cheeks pink. He’s worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, wringing his hands together nervously in his lap.

“I just—I feel like I should have noticed something. If I’d just—”

Shiro tugs him back gently. He’s careful with the medicine on Keith’s lower back as he pulls him into an awkward, backwards hug. His chin rests on Keith’s shoulder, and from here, he can feel the heat under Keith’s skin practically radiating off of him.

His voice is soft when he continues. Keith shudders at the feeling of his breath warm against the shell of his ear.

Keith feels small in his arms—so impossibly tiny, for being such a ferocious, passionate thing. Shiro pushes down the feelings of admiration that this instills within him—promises himself that he’ll lament on Keith’s ferocity versus his small stature at a later time, when the thought of it isn’t threatening to ruin whatever good moment he’s managed to patch together now with the man himself.

“If you want to make it up to me, get better. Let yourself heal. And… then we can talk about that kiss, and about that night when I pushed you away, and—and why that was the stupidest decision that I’ve ever made in my life.”

Keith’s skin feels impossibly warmer. He sputters for a moment, craning himself around as far as he can, given their position.

“Sh-Shiro, I thought—”

“I’m sorry, Keith.” Shiro cuts him off. “I should have told you then, but—I just, I didn’t feel like I deserved you. I didn’t feel like… you should have been wasting your time with me. But I had a lot of time to think, while I was away. I had a lot of things to consider, and I think—”

He buries his face into Keith’s shoulder, ignores the way that his own face feels suddenly just as fiery as Keith’s.

His voice is muffled when he continues, but by the way that Keith stiffens, he knows that he can hear him.

“I think we both just need to stop telling ourselves that we don’t deserve each other. I think… I think it’s about time that we just admit that we need each other, that—that whatever it is between us, it’s the best for both of us, so, if you’ll have me—”

“Of course I will.” Keith’s voice is firm now, reminiscent of the old Keith—the blunt Keith, the Keith who would never allow him to linger in self-deprecation or doubt for too long.

“—then I think we should… be together. I think… if you’ll be with me, maybe… every other horrible thing that’s happened, for me, will be… worth it.”

Keith is silent for a long time after that. The two of them sit together—a tangle of limbs, a silent, warm twine of thread, woven tightly together. Shiro listens to Keith’s soft breathing, his slowly-beating heart. He revels in the warmth and the softness of his skin, the gentle tickle of his hair. He breathes Keith in.

_This is real._

They’re back together.

And hopefully, nothing will ever tear them apart again.

“I’d be an idiot to say no to you,” Keith tells him, finally, so suddenly that the sound of his voice startles Shiro out of his thoughts, “I’ve been chasing after you since we were back at the Garrison, I’ve—”

“I’ve been in love with you since then, too.”

Keith chokes on something that might be a laugh. He raises up his hands, pressing his fingers softly into Shiro’s arms around him.

“We’re morons,” he says, something light, something akin to mirth tittering in his voice, “look at everything that it took to finally shake some sense into us.”

And Shiro laughs—he laughs because it’s true, Keith is right, and they’re fools. He laughs because he’s happy, because the world around them is dark, and chaotic, and warring. Because nothing is really okay. Because it’ll be weeks—months—until Keith finally feels comfortable enough entering the healing pod. Because eventually, they’ll have to tell Kolivan that they’ve found Keith—and he’ll tell Krolia, who still hasn’t seemed to disregard her distaste of the older Shiro long enough to trust the real one.

He laughs because the universe is so ludicrously broken. Because nothing is perfect, nothing left in this abysmal universe will ever be soft, or kind, or easy. They’re both battered soldiers, both pawns unfit for a normal, loving world.

They’ll never feel completely comfortable in their own skin. They’ll never feel beautiful, or lovable, or fit to roam among a human society, so ignorant of everything that they’ve lived through.

But they’re together now, after all of this time spend apart.

And Keith, right now, fits so comfortably, so perfectly in his arms.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Tout suffocant  
> Et blême, quand  
> Sonne l'heure,  
> Je me souviens  
> Des jours anciens  
> Et je pleure” - Paul Verlaine, ‘Autumn Song’
> 
> Merci beaucoup, Dracosh. Tu es un ami incroyable!


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